The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many
illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an
irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the
voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue
Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In
forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves
well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse—the
revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring
up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the
West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone
come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated
metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all
the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the
road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph
Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase
the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over
him."

Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is
now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant
than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was
what my friend—a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened
were I to identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is
what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the
political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first
century.

The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the
world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles;
armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra
Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was
in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke
into the house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of
value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala
Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been
suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of
ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department
report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and immigration
officials." This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed
a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan,
effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have
stick- and gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your
car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might
be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers
invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied
up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university
students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms,
they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on
fire. In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings,"
afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of
young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands
all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I
had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar
young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very
unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.

"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is
perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities
this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be
invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them
up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the
criminal process."

"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less
crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination.
Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial
Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to
a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here
spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group
against another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been
tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus
on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were
said to have "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always
walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made
her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury
charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of success."

Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way
of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is
increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in
West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in
one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose
family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates
and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and
animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of
life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while
desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and
more African peasants out of the countryside.